The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some of such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
Because frequency spectrum is a limited resource, several communication systems may share the same spectrum. In a given frequency spectrum a given number of frequency bands may be given to different operators or carriers in different locations. Typically each operator performs independent cellular coverage planning.
Present day methods for measuring cellular coverage in a cellular carrier's networks utilize radio scanners which operate in the cellular frequency bands. Typically, a route is driven using a vehicle equipped with the scanner equipment for collecting over-the-air downlink signals from the carrier's cell sites. GPS is used to geographically map the coverage area using specific signaling parameters for a given cellular technology. For Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) systems, signaling parameters measured and collected include received signal strength (RSSI), carrier-to-noise plus interference (CINR), the base station identifier code (BSIC), and broadcast channel (BCCH) messages. Within the BCCH messages are radio resource pseudo-length messages as specified in 3GPP standards. Within the set of BCCH messages include System Info Type 3 and 4 messages which provide information detailing the specific cell id, country code (MCC), network code (MNC), and location area code (LAC), among other information.
Present-day equipment offers the ability to show BSIC values and CINR values along with the GPS mapping of the carrier's coverage area which help reveal where there might be co-channel problems. Co-channel interference occurs when the frequency reuse plans are not optimized in a cellular network. In other words, two cell sites which cover the same region occupy the exact same radio frequency (the same absolute radio-frequency channel number, ARFCN). Typically a network is considered optimized if the CINR is maintained around 8-9 dB with RSSI levels down to −102 dB at which point a cellular phone would perform a hand-off to another stronger cell and is designed to operate.
However, present-day scanners do not provide simultaneous collection of more than one base station signal. Thus, both the desired and the interfering signals cannot be decoded simultaneously. Typically the only way of detecting possible co-channel interference is finding that the measured CINR is below the expected 8-9 dB with received signal strength above −102 dB. The existence and identification of co-channel interference is possible only when the collected data is post-processed in laboratory environment. This is tedious and slow.